Opinion: Far more firearms than we thought are now missing from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office - and they all went missing under Arpaio's tenure.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio frequently wore this tie pin while in office. If only he had more reverence for the real thing.(Photo11: Nick Oza/The Republic)

Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s negligence with firearms is worse than we thought.

Way worse.

An ongoing audit revealed that the department has no idea where 29 fully automatic firearms have gone. That’s 14 more than previously revealed in a 2016 internal audit.

In addition, the department has misplaced 20 short-barreled shotguns and a short-barreled rifle.

All told, that’s 50 firearms covered by the National Firearms Act of 1934 – items that require lots more than a simple background check for civilians to legally own – that are now simply unaccounted for.

And that’s not the worst news. It’s possible – actually, I’d say likely – that the number of missing MCSO firearms will go far higher, because the audit so far has only focused on the “more dangerous” weapons that have gone missing, not everyday handguns and rifles that may or may not be out on the street.

MCSO had to rely on the feds for a count

How is this possible?

How could an office that is charged with public safety be so lax with its own firearms?

Penzone – who stressed in a press conference that all 50 firearms identified to date went missing before he took office – said the previous administration kept some firearms in safes and relied on a simple sign-in, sign-out log to know who had what. The department can’t say for certain when many went missing, much less who might have them.

Some firearms were handed out haphazardly to officers – sort of a “hey, we’ve got new guns. You want one?” system. Even worse, Penzone said, some officers were issued seized firearms (you know, the ones used in crimes and such) after they were forfeited, apparently with little to no paperwork tracking them.

In fact, the Arpaio-era accounting was so bad that deputies conducting the new audit largely had to rely on federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives records to learn exactly how many fully automatic firearms were missing from their department.

50 more firearms are out there. Somewhere

It’s bad enough that two of MCSO’s fully automatic firearms were uncovered in a shootout on Interstate 17 that wounded three officers and put the public at risk. It remains unclear how Arnaldo Caraveo, who had spent three years in prison for burglary and aggravated assault, acquired them.

But there are at least 50 more firearms out there.

And. We. Have. No. Idea. Who. Has. Them.

As a responsible firearms owner, that burns me. It burns me that those we entrusted with our safety were so careless and irresponsible with their duty weapons.

What burns me even more is how cavalier Arpaio was in 2014 when it was first reported that firearms had gone missing. “I think we were (suspended from the federal program that provided many of these firearms) a couple of years ago,” he was quoted at the time, “but we don't care. We got our own.”

And then how he suddenly came down with amnesia late last year when asked again about them, telling ABC 15 in a statement that he “vaguely remember(ed) there were some weapons unaccounted for. I'm sure my staff looked into it and took whatever action necessary."

Please. They didn’t look into it. It took a shootout and help from the feds to uncover just how little reverence Arpaio and his administration had for the weapons with which they were entrusted.

I'm glad Penzone is still digging. I'm glad he's issued a call for current and former officers to surrender what's not theirs. And I'm glad he's putting the policies and inventory systems in place to ensure this scale of failure never happens again.